My whole life I’ve struggled with feeling like I had two competing sides, the artist and the scientist. It wasn’t until grad school that I found a way to merge the two interests. These days I consider myself an artist and designer and my preferred media are code and textiles.

I am currently an Assistant Professor in Digital Media at Georgia Tech. My research focuses on storytelling in games and craft using physical controllers and artificial intelligence to support new methods of gameplay. I am particularly interested in creating systems and interactive experiences that support a new range of storytelling voices that are currently underrepresented in games.

I have a PhD in computer science, with a focus on artificial intelligence in game design. My dissertation work was creating an AI framework that supported dynamic quest and story generation — making it possible for the player’s choices to really matter in the game, and for it to become their story. I also created a social-based RPG to use the framework and test its capabilities.

I have worn many hats in my lifetime including game programmer, game designer, graphic designer, entrepreneur, artist, and instructor. I draw on all of these experiences in my research and my teaching as they often provide a unique perspective to a problem that I or my students might be facing. I love finding ways to make programming accessible and relatable for students of all backgrounds.

I am an active game designer, and my most recent collaboration, Loominary, was recently shown at the SAAM Arcade exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Loominary uses a table-top loom as a game controller, and through interacting with the game, players literally weave their choices into a personalized woven story artifact.

I am also an avid quilter. I’ve had my quilts hang in the Ontario Museum of History and Art, San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles and Towson Art Collective among others. I love that quilts and other hand-crafted items have their own stories to tell. Perhaps they are celebrating a marriage or the birth of a baby, or perhaps it is the creator’s first attempt at doing curved piecing. Every fabric choice and design choice is part of the story the creator is telling. I can’t wait to see what stories we’ll tell next.